Why the Web Chose JavaScript—and Never Looked Back

Pre-JavaScript Era

In earlier days, the web was static. The web pages were built using HTML and some CSS for styling. The dynamic actions needed were handled on the server side. For filling a form, the page had to be reloaded after submission to get the submission status. This was not at all user-friendly.

Birth of the language JavaScript

In 1995, Netscape wanted a scripting language to customize the web pages for their browser (Netscape Navigator). So they hired an engineer (Brendan Eich) to build a scripting language to suit their needs. With Brendan’s skill and experience he quickly whipped up a good scripting language within 10 days.

It was originally called Mocha, then named to LiveScript and finally, it changed to JavaScript. The name JavaScript was used to ride the hype that Java was getting during the time. But saying Java is related to JavaScript is like saying Car is related to Carpet.

It was shipped with Netscape 2. Soon in 1997, it became the ECMA-262 standard. Following the standardization of JavaScript, Internet Explorer added its own version and called it JScript. Netscape and Internet Explorer, being the two dominant browsers at that time, implemented JavaScript directly to the browser that lead to it becoming the de facto standard. Being shipped with the browser meant that JavaScript did not need any extra software or plugins other than the standard browser that everyone used. Soon the popularity and ease of use of JavaScript triggered the trend of building advanced applications for better user experience.

Still JavaScript was synchronous. There were still places where getting the server response was not as smooth as it should have been In 2005, AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) was introduced. This was a huge boost to JavaScript’s responsiveness and dynamic abilities. AJAX was popularized by Google. There were a few UI libraries surfacing up during this time to make JavaScript more developer friendly.

But why is JavaScript still winning when there are better scripting languages now?

A handful of the developers might have had this question in their head at least once.

I have been thinking about this for quite a while now and even searched for browsers that supported other scripting languages as a JavaScript alternative. But all I could find are some dead projects on GitHub that were proof of concepts. There are plugins that enable running Lua and other scripting languages inside the browser with the help of JavaScript but no browsers have built-in support for other languages.

It took me some research to understand how and why JavaScript won over the web world.

JavaScript won by being born in the right place at the right time to get right backing and browser support.

It became the de facto standard for the web world from the start. Everyone adopted it so quickly and applications were being developed with it all over the world. By the time other scripting languages were getting attention, JavaScript was too popular and under use that changing the web standard was almost impossible.

While this was a good thing for JavaScript, this also affected the language in a bad way. Enhancing the language features and syntax was harder since deprecating certain features and modifying certain behaviors would affect all the web applications that were built using the language. Every change made to the language was sensitive.

This made the language messy. The bugs or non-intuitive behavior of the language would be used by some application’s logic in some way. So deprecating or modifying parts of the language meant adding a new and better way to do things even while having backwards compatibility to support the old way of doing things.

This mess was inevitable. Lua and other scripting languages have improved to this robust state because it had the freedom to introduce and deprecate language features in different versions. But it was not an option for JavaScript because of being adopted by the web at such a young age.

So does that mean we are stuck with JavaScript? Will there be no other alternatives?

To be honest, yes. JavaScript is engraved into the web world so deep that changing it would mean changing the whole internet for something new. Still there are better ways to implement performance critical applications now. The introduction of WebAssembly has enabled developers to write complex and CPU intensive logic as WebAssembly Modules (WASM) that can be called through JavaScript. It can run logics that demand performance with a suitable language while using JavaScript to access the DOM.

Web is improving day by day but JavaScript will stay with us for a really long time.